A&T Seminar

Starting up AWAKE Run 2: operating the facility during LS2 and first results of the 2021 proton run

by Giovanni Zevi Della Porta (CERN)

Europe/Zurich
Description

In Run 1 (2016-2018), the AWAKE experiment demonstrated for the first time ever that it was possible to accelerate externally-injected electrons to 2 GeV in plasma wakefields driven by a self-modulated proton bunch. In Run 2 (2021-2028+), AWAKE aims to improve even further the accelerating gradient in the plasma, as well as to demonstrate the scalability of the acceleration process and the beam quality and reliability of the accelerated electrons, in order to demonstrate that it is ready for particle physics applications. During LS2, without protons, we have studied and improved both the laser system used to create the plasma and the electron source and beamline system and its instrumentation, in preparation for the more stringent requirements of Run 2. In addition, the electron beamline was used as a testbed for machine-learning techniques, and electrons-in-plasma experiments were performed to refine the models used in predicting wakefield generated by electron bunches. During the proton run which started in July 2021, we began studying a key ingredient of the Run 2 program: the event-to-event phase reproducible self-modulation of the entire proton bunch seeded by a short electron bunch preceding the protons. In this seminar I will give an overview of the AWAKE Run 2 program, a summary of the achievements from the operation of the facility during LS2 and 2021, and preliminary results of the 2021 proton run.